Abaqus 6.12 Performance Benchmark and Profiling

September 2012

2

Note

• The following research was performed under the HPC

Advisory Council activities

– Special thanks for: HP, Mellanox

• For more information on the supporting vendors solutions

please refer to:

– www.mellanox.com, http://www.hp.com/go/hpc

• For more information on the application:

– http://www.simulia.com

3

Abaqus by SIMULIA

• Abaqus Unified FEA product suite offers powerful and complete

solutions for both routine and sophisticated engineering problems

covering a vast spectrum of industrial applications

• The Abaqus analysis products listed below focus on:

– Nonlinear finite element analysis (FEA)

– Advanced linear and dynamics application problems

• Abaqus/Standard

– General-purpose FEA that includes broad range of analysis capabilities

• Abaqus/Explicit

– Nonlinear, transient, dynamic analysis of solids and structures using

explicit time integration

4

Objectives

• The presented research was done to provide best practices

– Abaqus performance benchmarking

– Interconnect performance comparisons

– MPI performance comparison

– Understanding Abaqus communication patterns

• The presented results will demonstrate

– The scalability of the compute environment to provide nearly linear

application scalability

5

Test Cluster Configuration

• HP ProLiant SL230s Gen8 4-node “Athena” cluster

– Processors: Dual Eight-Core Intel Xeon E5-2680 @ 2.7 GHz

– Memory: 32GB per node, 1600MHz DDR3 DIMMs

– OS: RHEL 6 Update 2, OFED 1.5.3 InfiniBand SW stack

• Mellanox ConnectX-3 VPI InfiniBand adapters

• Mellanox SwitchX SX6036 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 40Gb/s Ethernet Switch

• MPI: Platform MPI 8.1.2 (vendor provided)

• Application: Abaqus 6.12-2

• Benchmark Workload:

– Abaqus/Explicit benchmarks: E6: Concentric Spheres

6

Item SL230 Gen8

Processor Two Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 Series, 4/6/8 Cores,

Chipset Intel® Sandy Bridge EP Socket-R

Memory (512 GB), 16 sockets, DDR3 up to 1600MHz, ECC

Max Memory 512 GB

Internal Storage

Two LFF non-hot plug SAS, SATA bays or

Four SFF non-hot plug SAS, SATA, SSD bays

Two Hot Plug SFF Drives (Option)

Max Internal Storage 8TB

Networking Dual port 1GbE NIC/ Single 10G NIC

I/O Slots One PCIe Gen3 x16 LP slot

1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet, IB, and FlexFabric options

Ports Front: (1) Management, (2) 1GbE, (1) Serial, (1) S.U.V port, (2)

PCIe, and Internal Micro SD card & Active Health

Power Supplies 750, 1200W (92% or 94%), high power chassis

Integrated Management iLO4

hardware-based power capping via SL Advanced Power Manager

Additional Features Shared Power & Cooling and up to 8 nodes per 4U chassis, single

GPU support, Fusion I/O support

Form Factor 16P/8GPUs/4U chassis

About HP ProLiant SL230s Gen8

7

Abaqus/Explicit Benchmark – CPU Generation

Lower is better

53%

• Input dataset: E6

– Concentric Spheres

• Intel E5-2680 processors (Sandy Bridge) cluster outperforms prior CPU generation

– Performs 53% higher than X5670 cluster at 4 nodes

• System components used:

– Athena: 2-socket Intel E5-2680 @ 2.7GHz, 1600MHz DIMMs, FDR InfiniBand, 1HDD

– Plutus: 2-socket Intel X5670 @ 2.93GHz, 1333MHz DIMMs, QDR InfiniBand, 1HDD

Wall Clock Time:

based on total

runtime

8

Abaqus/Explicit Performance - Interconnect

• InfiniBand FDR is the most efficient inter-node communication for Abaqus/Explicit

– Outperforms 1GbE by 109% at 4 nodes

– Outperforms 10GbE by 23% at 4 nodes

– Outperforms 40GbE by 20% at 4 nodes

Higher is better

20% 23% 109%

Performance Rating:

based on total

runtime

9

Abaqus/Explicit Profiling – MPI Time Ratio

• InfiniBand FDR reduces the MPI communication time

– InfiniBand FDR consumes about 35% of total runtime at 4 nodes

– Ethernet solutions consume from 48% to 70% at 4 nodes

10

Abaqus/Explicit Profiling – Time Spent in MPI

• Abaqus/Explicit shows high usage for testing non-blocking messages

– MPI_Iprobe (95%), MPI_Test (3%)

With all MPI calls Without MPI_Iprobe

11

Abaqus/Explicit Profiling – Time Spent in MPI

• Abaqus/Explicit: More time spent on MPI collective operations:

– InfiniBand FDR: MPI_Gather(82%), MPI_Allreduce (4%), MPI_Scatterv(3%)

– 1GbE: MPI_Gather(41%), MPI_Irecv(15%), MPI_Scatterv(12%)

12

Abaqus/Explicit Profiling – Message Sizes

• Abaqus/Explicit shows a wide distribution of small message sizes

– Small messages peak in the range from 65B to 256B

13

Abaqus Summary

• HP ProLiant Gen8 servers delivers better performance than its predecessor

– ProLiant Gen8 equipped with Intel E5 series processes and InfiniBand FDR

– Up to 53% higher performance than ProLiant G7 when compared at 4 nodes

• InfiniBand FDR is the most efficient inter-node communication for Abaqus/Explicit

– Outperforms 1GbE by 109% at 4 nodes

– Outperforms 10GbE by 23% at 4 nodes

– Outperforms 40GbE by 20% at 4 nodes

• Abaqus Profiling

– InfiniBand FDR reduces communication time; provides more time for computation

• InfiniBand FDR consumes 35-40% of total time, versus 45-70% for Ethernet solutions

– MPI:

• Large MPI call volumes for testing non-blocking data transfers (MPI_Iprobe, MPI_Test, etc)

• MPI time is spent mostly on collective operations

• Messages are concentrated in small messages, peak at around 65-256 bytes

14 14

Thank You HPC Advisory Council

All trademarks are property of their respective owners. All information is provided “As-Is” without any kind of warranty. The HPC Advisory Council makes no representation to the accuracy and

completeness of the information contained herein. HPC Advisory Council Mellanox undertakes no duty and assumes no obligation to update or correct any information presented herein